Photo by William Milliot
Creating conditions for livestock to be a climate benefit rather than a net emitter of greenhouse gas emissions is a knowledge-intensive endeavor. Understanding the natural history and the human and animal impacts that have led to the current ecological conditions of a site are critical to developing a healthy, biodiverse, working landscape. Properly managed livestock grazing can play a keystone role in climate-healthy rangelands that can capture more carbon than the carbon equivalent greenhouse gas emissions that the livestock emit.
Wendell Gilgert, the Working Landscapes Program Director Emeritus for Point Blue Conservation Service, began working with the National Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) in 1977 to restore rangelands and riparian zones and conserve farmland. Profoundly influenced by the writings of the visionary conservationist and wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold, Gilgert was especially impressed with this passage from Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen.” Leopold made reference to becoming a “land doctor” without specifically defining what that meant. Gilgert’s work has been a life-long quest to understand and develop the concept of what it means to be a land doctor. Gilgert was interviewed by Arty Mangan of Bioneers.
ARTY MANGAN: How do you use the lens of “land doctor” when you assess a landscape for restoration?
WENDELL GILGERT: A land doctor is someone who looks at a whole series of cycles, systems and processes, engaging all five senses, so I look at water and nutrient cycles and flows, biological integrity, sedimentation and erosion processes, and phenology to try to understand how the patient (the land) is doing, and what is needed to restore it to health.
For example, instead of merely installing a grade stabilization structure in a gully to arrest erosion—which is just a Band-Aid—a land doctor should consider what caused the gully in the first place, and then walk the land, walk along the streams, and look up into the watershed to see if there are issues with the water cycle. Is there water infiltrating into the soil? Is there “hard pan” [a dense, hard layer of calcified soil that prevents root penetration and water infiltration]. Have there been other kinds of human activities that have made the soil into a hard table top from which water runs off instead of a sponge, where water infiltrates and reaches the plant roots.
I try to go back into time to look at how Native Americans utilized the land, borrowing heavily from Kat Anderson’s books Before the Wilderness and Tending the Wild as guideposts to understanding Traditional Ecological Knowledge. In that process, I try to look back into the Pleistocene era to try to understand how long specific plants have been here and what kind of influence they have had along their evolutionary path. Trees and shrubs that are common in a lot of our landscapes in California and in the West have been here for thousands, and in some cases millions, of years. How did they co-evolve with big megafauna that were numerous on this continent not that long ago: mammoths, mastodons, sloths, rhinos, bison, horses? Those big grazers were under the presence of a whole bunch of now extinct ornery predators – short-faced bears, the dire wolf, American cheetah – that moved these animals around. Grazing and herbivory on the land have co-evolved over millions of years.
Over time, my thinking has evolved in an effort to try to be consistent with mimicking how nature works and later how the Indigenous people, prior to contact, cared for the land. When the Europeans encountered North America, they considered it to be wild, untended land, but in fact what they saw was a park-like kind of landscape, much of which was stewarded by Native Americans. The idea of wilderness, the idea of completely pristine, untouched land is, for the most part BS. Humans have been manipulating most of these lands for tens of thousands of years.
I work with grazers and browsers. Grazers are ungulates that feed on grasses, forbs and some soft-bodied plants, while browsers feed on woody material such as trees and shrubs. Goats are browsers, and deer, a lot of the year, are browsers. Elk are generally grazers, but if they’re forced to be, they’ll be browsers. Cattle are primarily grazers, but if they’re not getting the nutrients they need, then they can create mischief if they’re allowed to camp in riparian areas or other areas where they create what we call browsed lines.
It is important to understand that these animals historically and ecologically moved under the influence of predators and Native Americans’ intentional use of fire. The construction of fencing is anathema to the health of the land. It’s not something that this land co-evolved with or responds to in a positive way. In order to mimic the dynamics that these lands evolved with, we need to employ multi-paddock and intensive rotational grazing, (also known as “holistic management”). In that system, time, intensity, duration and disturbance are controlled by the land owner.
People love to make cows ecological villains, and my response to that is that cows don’t make decisions, humans do. If a human lets cows camp in a riparian area for three months in the summertime, that’s on people, that’s not on the cows. You’ve got to give cows a little bit of credit for being smart because in the summertime when they’ve got heel flies and it’s hot, they’re not going to be on top of the hill basking in the sunshine. They’re going to be down in the riparian areas trying to fight off the heel flies and the face flies where it’s a little bit cooler and where they can get water. So, we have to manage that and not allow them to camp there.
We don’t want cattle taking more than two or three bites of a plant because that starts impacting the photosynthesis which is key to carbon sequestration. Photosynthesis is really our only ecologically sound and inexpensive tool to sequester carbon.
If a plant is not getting adequate amounts of soil, nutrients, space, moisture, and light, then photosynthesis will be inefficient. The plant will limp along and have a Brix (a measure of sugar content), of three to four percent. If that same plant gets all the nutrients, sunlight, space and water it needs, then that Brix is going to kick up into 15 to 20 percent. As plants harvest sunshine and produce sugars, they push a good percent of them down into the roots, and those sugars leak out, and that’s what feeds the soil, that’s what feeds the microbes, and that’s what gets sequestered. You know a plant is in good shape if you pull up a root and you don’t see a bare white or pink root; you see the soil adhered to it because the microbes are producing slime and molds and other compounds. The soil microbes are feeding on those sugars that the plant is exuding into the soil.
ARTY: You talked about what happens when livestock overgraze and how predators historically were key to moving the animals before they over-grazed. What are the different systems of grazing and how do they either enhance or inhibit the movement of livestock and photosynthesis and carbon sequestration.
WENDELL: Even with all the information and the evidence we have, most people still do what we call set stock grazing, or continuous grazing, either seasonally or year-long. In those systems, the animals are put on a property where there are few or no fences, and the cows go where they want, when they want. If it’s season-long continuous grazing, as it often is here in California in a Mediterranean climate, they’ll gather them in the springtime and move the livestock to wherever the summer pastures are going to be. Then they bring them back in in the fall when there’s adequate water and feed. Sometimes the food’s not adequate, so they have to feed them hay, which gets very expensive, and then they start the process over again.
And continuous grazing favors weeds. I use the analogy of a banquet table. If you and I go to a banquet table that’s loaded with all kinds of great things as well as things we may not like so much, and we’re really hungry, and there are only two of us, what’s our behavior going to be?
ARTY: Eat all the best stuff.
WENDELL: Damn right, but if you go into this banquet room and it’s crowded, three people deep, and everybody’s hungry, what’s your behavior then?
ARTY: Get whatever I can grab.
WENDELL: Damn right. You elbow your way in and grab whatever’s in front of you, whatever you can get. It’s the same thing with livestock. If there’s no impetus for the herd to stay together, i.e., there are no predators around and no humans to keep them close, then they’re going to go out and select the best tasting plants, until those plants, which were mostly native plants, are gone. And you’re left with a landscape dominated by weeds, mostly invasive, Mediterranean annuals.
A much better approach is planned, intensive grazing in which you have multiple paddocks on a ranch. Let’s say you have a thousand-acre ranch with ten 100-acre pastures. First, you’d want to make sure there was adequate water as well as good quality access roads. Most people don’t know that the number one source of erosion on range and forest lands is poorly developed and designed access roads, so you’d want to have good access roads to be able to get to your ten 100-acre pastures.
Then you’d want to match the number of animals to what the ground and vegetation can handle in high, medium and low-production years, and you have to watch the livestock daily. You’ve got to be out there looking at them every day paying close attention to how they’re impacting the landscape. After they’ve had a second bite and they’re starting in on their third and fourth bite of that same plant, it’s time to move them.If you watch expert ranchers who work this way, such as Loren and Lisa Poncia at Stemple Creek Ranch or Mark Biaggi at TomKat Ranch, they don’t have to be on four-wheelers or on horseback. When they open the gate and get out of the way, the cows know that there’s good food in the next paddock.
The idea is to keep moving the cows from paddock to paddock at the right time, giving plants ample time to grow back. Let’s say that, for example, each paddock’s optimal use was four days. With ten paddocks, by the time you return the cows to the one they started in, that land has had 40 days’ rest. The key is not to let the cows overstay in any paddock, because if you lose more than 50 percent of the biomass aboveground, then the plant starts sacrificing root and the land can’t regenerate quickly enough.
Good grazing management requires a keen understanding of the nutrition cycle. During the winter cows have fed mostly on residual dry matter left over from last year’s graze. Good ranchers leave the soil protected coming into the year. When spring comes, plants are starting to turn green, now there is a little green mixed in with the old hay, so the nutritional plane is starting to increase. If it doesn’t look like rain in the near future, then those cows on this new, green, recently germinated grass have to be moved more frequently.
It’s also important to understand the differences between the growing cycles of perennial grasses, forbs and shrubs and of annual plants. An annual plant has to wait for rain to germinate, while a perennial plant responds to daylight hours and moisture. At the end of August when the days start getting shorter, those perennial grasses, if there’s sufficient soil moisture left, start greening up. If you put the animals in a little too early on those perennials that have two or three inches of green, they’ll nip it right off at the bud, so you have to be careful on which pastures you graze cows and for how long depending upon whether those fields are composed of mostly native or mostly introduced perennial grasses.
People think that all ranchers do is move cows around and brand them, but it’s so much more than that. They’ve got to be continuously looking at the ground, observing what’s going on with water and soil moisture and how quickly their animals are eating through the vegetation and if their nutrition intake is sufficient to give birth to healthy calves, etc.
ARTY: What are the specific benefits of a herd’s disturbance of a landscape? How does it stimulate plant growth, and in what other ways can the disturbance of grazing animals benefit biodiversity?
WENDELL: We know that the native ungulates, both recent, current and prehistoric, created big disturbance on the land. We now have wolves in California again. If you go out and spend any time looking at where these animals take down the prey – whether an elk or a deer or some other prey – it’s not pretty; they tear the ground up.
But a lot of disturbance from grazers is a result of the action of hooves, which break up surface plants and thereby create areas where seeds can get additional water. It also puts vegetation in contact with the soil allowing the microbes to start decomposing the dry matter more quickly through that biological activity than mere weathering would allow. Some state parks offer a great example of what a lack of herbivores can do to land. When plants are standing and are not in close contact with the soil, you get a lot of thatch, which is a buildup of plants. The thatch turns gray, which indicates that it’s weathering, not biologically decomposing, and it often shades out things underneath, so the land becomes a gateway for the spread of weeds and invasive species that we really don’t want in pastures, so there are risks to the health of the land in both overgrazing and in too little grazing.
ARTY: What is your approach to helping ranchers change their management practices so they can enhance biodiversity and develop a climate-friendly system on their land?
WENDELL: I first like to walk the land with people and get them to engage all five of their senses, not just what they hear and see. After about a half an hour or so, I’ll ask: “What does the land feel like under your feet? Is it spongy? Is it like concrete? What do you smell?”
There are all these processes that most people don’t have a clue about. If I ask a hundred people to go out in a field with me and tell me if the water cycle in that place is effective or disjunct, probably 99 out of 100 could not tell me. They wouldn’t have a clue. Do they see puddles filling with coarse fragments on the soil? Do they see any kind of evidence of sheet rill gully erosion? Do they see sediment in the water? Do they understand that most of the time the sediment in the water– the color in the water – is the clay particle of the sand, silt and clay in the soil because clay stays suspended in water.
If I walk the land with people, I will guarantee them that they will never see the land the same way they saw it before, and that generally will energize people. That generally will give people a level of excitement that I can follow up with them on. That’s part of what I call land doctoring. It includes going out and looking for things like dragonflies. Why? Well, biological integrity depends on bugs; bugs drive the system. Dragonflies are apex aerial predators, and if you’ve got dragonflies and you’ve got spiders—another apex invertebrate predator—then there’s probably a lot of other bugs to feed the spiders and to feed the dragonflies. The insects are usually the basis of healthy biotic integrity.
In the wintertime, I look for a bird called the Black Phoebe. The Black Phoebe is a flycatcher, and it’s one of the only flycatchers that doesn’t migrate. All the other flycatchers, except Say’s Phoebes, head south. If you have Black Phoebes and Say’s Phoebes on your land in winter, they’re telling you that the biotic integrity of that area is good because the birds can live on bugs through the wintertime.
One of the main diagnostic tools I use to judge the health of the land is observing phenology [note: the study of seasonal and cyclic natural phenomena]. What are the first plants budding out or blooming? When do the acorns drop, etc.? Is the phenology in sync with what the land ought to be?Though, obviously, with climate change, phenology has been knocked on its keister in a lot of cases.
I also look at erosion, checking, for example, the kinds of erosion and sedimentation that should naturally occur in and around creeks. Is the meander and the attenuation of the velocity of a stream by sediment functioning properly? There’s no better time to get out on a landscape than during a rainstorm to see where the water’s going. I want to see what kind of load it’s carrying, if it’s clean, if it’s going over land or infiltrating into the ground, etc.
The land speaks volumes. It’s talking to us all the time, but it’s a language most people don’t have a clue about or care about. Deciphering it starts with close observation. There’s always a vocabulary out there, and like any foreign language that you begin to learn, there comes a point at which, all of a sudden, after a while, you start understanding the language. It’s the same thing with nature. If you start paying attention to what nature’s doing, how it’s doing it, why it’s doing it, where it’s doing it, when it’s doing it, then you get this “Aha” moment, and at that point, if you’re not walking around the land with a grin on your face, you’re probably in the wrong line of work.
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The post How to Become a Land Doctor: An Interview with Rangeland Conservation Expert Wendell Gilgert appeared first on Bioneers.